cEMV payment and smart ticketing

PROBLEM
Oxford Bus Company wanted to decrease the use of cash on all its buses and provide the convenience of contactless technology, without incurring prohibitive card processing costs. There was also a need to have a solid understanding of the customer proposition and whether this technology might offer a medium to long term opportunity to decrease the use of cash, ITSO commercial products or both.

SOLUTION
By partnering with an innovative payments provider, we could leverage its cloud-based, bank-grade platform to deliver a cost-efficient card payments processing system (including authorisation, settlement, risk and fraud engine). By using the UKCA Model 2 for Transit contactless implementation, we were able to deliver low value/high volume transactions.

The ‘first ride protection’ and the debt recovery mechanisms in place allowed us to minimise the operator’s risk to less than 1% (well below the card payments industry average), and this ensured low transaction fees and low risk on payments.

RESULTS
Hammock was instrumental in helping Oxford Bus Company achieve its business goals. Contactless payments were launched in June 2017 and, within 20 weeks, over 25% of bus revenue was going through contactless with this percentage continually growing.

Oxford Bus Company has said that this is its first step in delivering a worldleading transit payments solution. The contactless payment solution, which has proven to be both resilient and flexible, has now been rolled out across 1,800 Go-Ahead buses in just four months.